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All that comes to be, work of nature or of craft, some wisdom
has made: everywhere a wisdom presides at a making.
No doubt the wisdom of the artist may be the guide of the work;
it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom exhibited in the arts;
but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in
Nature which is embodied in himself; and this is not a wisdom
built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of
manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity
working out into detail.
Now, if we could think of this as the primal wisdom, we need look
no further, since, at that, we have discovered a principle which
is neither a derivative nor a "stranger in something strange to
it." But if we are told that, while this Reason-Principle is in
Nature, yet Nature itself is its source, we ask how Nature came
to possess it; and, if Nature derived it from some other source,
we ask what that other source may be; if, on the contrary, the
principle is self-sprung, we need look no further: but if we are
referred to the Intellectual-Principle we must make clear whether
the Intellectual-Principle engendered the wisdom: if we learn
that it did, we ask whence: if from itself, then inevitably, it
is itself Wisdom.
The true Wisdom, then [found to be identical with the
Intellectual-Principle] is Real Being; and Real Being is Wisdom;
it is wisdom that gives value to Real Being; and Being is Real in
virtue of its origin in wisdom. It follows that all forms of
existence not possessing wisdom are, indeed, Beings in right of
the wisdom which went to their forming but, as not in themselves
possessing it, are not Real Beings.
We cannot therefore think that the divine Beings of that sphere,
or the other supremely blessed There, need look to our apparatus
of science: all of that realm, all is noble image, such images as
we may conceive to lie within the soul of the wise- but There not
as inscription but as authentic existence. The ancients had this
in mind when they declared the Ideas to be Beings, Essentials.
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